Superstar investors give Upstart $5.9M for its first birthday

Upstart, the company that hopes to encourage promising college students to get their degrees before pursuing the startups of their dreams, just celebrated its first birthday with a $5.9 million Series A round. The funding, from new investors Khosla Ventures, Founder’s Fund, Collaborative Fund, Google(S goog) Chairman Eric Schmidt, Salesforce.com(s crm) CEO Marc Benioff and serial entrepreneur Scott Banister, comes atop a $1.75 million seed round that helped kick off the venture in April 2012.

The company also gets two new board members, Bob Kerrey, the former senator from Nebraska and former president of the New School, and Jessica Jackley, co-founder of Kiva, which helps organizations obtain microfinancing.

David Girouard, the former president of Google Enterprise, founded Upstart last year because he thought that the difference between a smart grad starting his or her own company or not often boils down to relatively small amount of money. “At…